“It didn’t take the ghosts who haunt your house long to figure out who she was—we ghosts have known about the Oakses for years. And it didn’t take long for us to see she was hiding, and to guess whom she was hiding from.” For a moment pity overtakes him, deepening the lines on his face. “The ghosts at your house, including Ebb, watched her stash The Witch Hunter’s Guide under the floor and wait for your arrival. She was hiding your history from you, I suppose. She was already, before you were born, hiding your sight. She was turning her back on all of it.”

“But why?” I finally interrupt.

Homer looks at me sadly. “As I think Ebb has told you, those with the sight stand out in the world like a beacon, easy for witches to find. Most of them pose no threat to witches. And a witch hunter can learn to sort of… dim themselves, a mental trick that’s hard to master. But the daughter of a witch hunter, a defenseless child… well, I suspect that, despite all her courage, she couldn’t face the possibility of losing you.”

I swallow the lump in my throat.

“And she might have had a chance to live a normal life with you. Only…”

“Only?”

Homer wrings his hands together and lowers his voice, looking around the cemetery again as if keeping an eye out for the Memory Thief herself.

“Only, somewhere in her travels—we believe—she’d discovered the enormous secret of finding and reaching the witches. The rumors circulated quite a bit at the time. And those rumors, I believe, made it to the witches’ ears.” He leans back, as if he doesn’t want to say what he has to say next. “And even though the famous Annabelle Oaks had given up hunting witches, a witch came for her anyway. And for you. And that’s the impossible thing.”

“What?” I ask, confused.

“Why, isn’t it obvious?” he says. “You’re still here.”

Homer drops his voice lower still. He leans toward us, and speaks so quietly, we have to lean forward to hear him.

“The night you were born, your mother was cursed. That much is obvious. When she went to the hospital to have you, she was the same powerful woman we had always heard about. But when she came out, her memories were gone; she was just a shell of a person.

“As the newborn daughter of the woman who had so threatened the witches and their secrets, the Memory Thief should have hated you, even feared you. And you were but a helpless baby; it would have been so easy for her to curse you, too, or to bid her familiars to steal you. But for some reason that we can’t begin to guess, you weren’t taken. Your mother’s memories were—but not you.” He smiles gently.